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Wim Vermeulen - The Science of Credibility

Wed, 20 May 2026 23:00:00 GMT

In conventional advertising, exaggeration is practically part of the job description. For decades, agencies have operated under a script perfected in the 1950s and 60s by industry pioneers like David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach: dramatise the benefit. Take a product attribute, magnify it, and turn it into a compelling narrative.

Think of a standard toothpaste commercial. The voiceover confidently promises that your teeth will be crystal clear within two weeks. As consumers, we have spent a lifetime learning to decode this language. No one literally expects their teeth to replicate a diamond, and nobody returns a tube of toothpaste demanding a refund when they do not. We understand the unwritten rule: the benefit has simply been dramatised.

But when you apply that same 1950s advertising script to sustainability, the system completely breaks down.

I recently spoke with Wim Vermeulen , an award-winning strategist, author, and partner at the sustainable communication agency Bubka . Wim’s career began in traditional advertising, but six years ago, as the first wave of massive corporate sustainability campaigns began hitting the market, his gut told him something was fundamentally wrong. To figure out what, he teamed up with the University of Ghent to run a massive scientific study, testing 100 sustainability campaigns for effectiveness.

What they discovered exposes the fatal flaw in modern green marketing.

The Only Metric That Matters

When Wim and the academic researchers crunched the data from those 100 campaigns, they expected to find a variety of creative factors driving success. Instead, they found that effectiveness was almost entirely dictated by a single, monolithic variable: credibility.

Unlike conventional advertising, where consumers willingly tolerate exaggeration, sustainability communication operates under a zero-tolerance policy. Because sustainability campaigns are dealing with systemic, real-world crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, using the old "dramatised benefit" script triggers immediate scepticism.

If a brand overpromises or wraps its message in corporate hyperbole, the audience does not read between the lines; they simply stop believing. In sustainability, you are either credible or you are greenwashing. There is no grey area.

Introducing the Net Credibility Score (NCS)

To help brands navigate this high-stakes landscape, Wim and the University of Ghent developed a framework called the Net Credibility Score (NCS) . Operating on a similar logic to the traditional Net Promoter Score, the NCS provides an objective benchmark for trust.

You measure the exact percentage of consumers who genuinely believe a campaign's narrative, subtract the percentage who do not, and the resulting figure gives you your benchmark.

The results across different European markets reveal a highly sceptical public. In Belgium, the average baseline benchmark sits at roughly 30. In the hyper-critical market of the Netherlands, the benchmark drops to just 15. If a sustainability campaign cannot score above these baseline numbers, it is not just wasting ad spend; it is actively damaging the brand's reputation.

Perceived Honesty vs Internal Intent

The core takeaway from Wim’s initial research is a brutal pill for marketers to swallow: honesty is not defined by your internal intentions; it is defined by consumer perception.

It does not matter if a sustainability team spent three years meticulously crafting a carbon-reduction initiative with the best intentions. If the final marketing campaign feels dishonest, exaggerated, or vague to the average consumer on the street, it is functionally dishonest.

In Part 2, we will look at why the corporate panic known as "greenhushing" is fueling consumer anxiety, and examine the six core indicators that determine whether the public will actually buy into your sustainability story.

Wim Vermeulen - The Myth of Climate Fatigue and the High Cost of Silence

Wed, 20 May 2026 23:00:00 GMT

In Part 1 , strategist Wim Vermeulen explained why the traditional marketing playbook of exaggerating benefits completely backfires when applied to sustainability. Now, we address one of the most pervasive myths circulating in boardrooms: the idea that the public has developed "climate fatigue" and simply wants brands to stop talking about environmental issues.

According to Wim's ongoing data collection with the University of Ghent, this assumption is completely wrong. Consumers have not tuned out. In fact, corporate silence is actively making them anxious.

The Reality of Climate Anxiety

"There is no climate fatigue," Wim states bluntly. "People are highly concerned, and their stress levels are rising as the physical impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss become part of daily life. What marketers misinterpret as fatigue is actually a profound sense of isolation and disappointment."

The data shows that everyday citizens feel completely alone in tackling the transition. They recognise the sheer scale of the crisis and look to policymakers and businesses to lead the way. However, public trust in politicians to execute this transition is disastrously low, hovering around just 9% in certain regions of Europe.

Naturally, consumers look to the next most powerful institutions: corporations. Trust in businesses to drive meaningful change can reach as high as 83%. Yet, precisely when consumers are looking for corporate leadership, boardrooms have gone completely dark.

The Trap of Greenhushing

Terrified of strict green claims regulations and desperate to avoid public accusations of greenwashing, corporate legal departments have enforced a policy of "greenhushing", quietly continuing sustainability investments behind the scenes while scrubbing all mention of them from public marketing materials.

Wim warns that this silence carries an incredibly high commercial cost.

When consumers see a political class they do not trust and a business community that has gone completely silent, they are left with a terrifying question: Has the problem been solved, or is nobody capable of solving it? This vacuum creates profound anxiety, which quickly morphs into deep distrust of silent brands.

Conversely, it creates an unprecedented commercial opportunity. The businesses willing to step into the light and communicate openly will capture a massive wave of consumer support. But to do that safely, they must design their messaging around the six indicators of credibility.

The Six Drivers of Sustainability Credibility

Through rigorous testing, Wim’s research identified six specific levers that determine whether a sustainable narrative will be accepted or rejected by the public:

Honesty: The undisputed heavyweight. Is the claim transparent, admitting limitations rather than pretending to be flawless?

Commitment: Is this a core, long-term business transformation, or a superficial, short-term marketing campaign?

Urgency: Does the brand demonstrate that it understands the immediate timeline of the climate transition?

Shared Value: Is it clear what is in it for the individual consumer (such as affordability or quality) and what is in it for wider society?

Clarity of Proof Points: Are the facts accessible, easy to digest, and verifiable?

Relevance: Is the message tied to immediate, tangible human needs, rather than abstract, corporate net-zero targets?

The old paradigm of screaming "We will be net zero by 2042!" across a billboard is dead. Consumers do not understand abstract carbon metrics, and they reject narratives built around scarcity and sacrifice. To move the market forward, brands must learn how to construct validated, audience-centric storylines.

In Part 3, we will explore the Responsible Growth Model, examine why Tesla’s reputation is cratering, and look at the hard correlation between audited responsibility and direct sales impact.

Wim Vermeulen - The Responsible Business Index and the Financial Moat of Trust

Wed, 20 May 2026 23:00:00 GMT

In the final part of our series with award-winning strategist Wim Vermeulen , we move away from abstract marketing theories and look directly at the hard, financial data. For years, sceptical chief executives have viewed corporate responsibility as a moral duty, a cost centre to be managed rather than a driver of top-line growth.

But Bubka's latest Responsible Business Index research reveals that responsibility has officially become a primary engine of commercial reputation and sales. If your brand ignores this shift, the market data shows it will actively cost you customers.

The Brand Disconnect: The Case of Nike and Tesla

Every single company operating today possesses a "responsibility reputation." Whether you choose to communicate it or not, consumers have already assigned a score to your brand, and no one scores neutral. You are either building equity or burning it.

Wim points to traditional reputation models versus responsibility indexes to highlight massive corporate blind spots. Take a brand like Nike . In conventional reputation rankings, Nike consistently scores among the top global brands due to product innovation and cultural dominance. However, when you isolate the metric of responsibility, their score plummets. Consumers instantly cross-reference the brand against underlying anxieties regarding supply chain ethics, labour conditions, and plastic waste.

An even more extreme example is Tesla . Historically viewed as the poster child for sustainable innovation, Tesla has recently become the worst-scoring brand on the entire Responsibility Index in Belgium, registering a staggering minus 55.

This precipitous drop has absolutely nothing to do with the engineering of the cars; it is a direct reflection of public perception surrounding Elon Musk’s political actions and governance.

Because responsibility is holistic, a CEO's personal brand can completely erase the environmental credentials of the product. And the data shows this reputation dip is now actively depressing Tesla's sales.

The 0.91 Correlation: Responsibility Equals Revenue

On the opposite end of the spectrum sits Too Good To Go , an app dedicated to reducing retail food waste. On a benchmark where the average corporate score is 41, Too Good To Go registers an astonishing plus 93 .

What makes this truly revolutionary for boardrooms is the mathematical correlation discovered by Wim's research team. When they mapped Responsibility Index Scores against a company's Net Promoter Score (NPS), they found a correlation coefficient of 0.91 for top-performing responsible brands.

In data science, a 0.91 correlation is incredibly powerful. It proves that an investment in perceived corporate responsibility directly drives consumer recommendation, brand preference, and immediate sales. It removes ideology from the conversation and turns responsibility into a cold, hard fiduciary requirement.

De-risking the Narrative with the Responsible Growth Model

Because the stakes are so high, companies can no longer afford to rely on gut instinct when designing their narratives. "In sustainability communication, gut instinct is wrong most of the time," Wim notes. "The subject is simply too complex, and emotional projection from executives usually alienates the consumer."

To fix this, Bubka and the University of Ghent utilise the Responsible Growth Model . Rather than launching unvalidated creative campaigns, they present structured, unformatted claims and arguments to consumer testing panels to objectively measure credibility, honesty, and urgency before a single advertising penny is spent.

For instance, a utility company might automatically assume its best headline is "Investing millions in offshore wind." But testing might reveal that consumers find that narrative distant and corporate. By pivoting the core narrative to focus on local economic stability, grid resilience, and long-term price security, whilst keeping net-zero targets as the supporting proof point rather than the headline, the brand instantly unlocks consumer engagement.

Action Inspires Hope

To motivate a population currently frozen by economic anxiety, corporate narratives must abandon the dark, data-heavy warnings of the scientific community and embrace structured, verified hope.

Wim points to Bubka's cinematic project, We The Hopeful , which tested two futuristic scenarios with audiences. The film, focusing on a dark, failed future, lost viewer engagement within ten seconds. The version rooted in a hopeful, triumphant future drove unprecedented consumer action.

"Action inspires hope, and hope inspires action," Wim concludes. "It is a full circle. Business leaders can no longer allow personal political views or legal timidity to dictate their communication strategy. The transition is happening, the world is rewriting its rules, and the winners will be the brands brave enough to speak the truth, back it with data, and lead their consumers forward."

Mia Hartwell - Escaping Carbon Tunnel Vision and the Rockstar Brands of Regeneration

Thu, 14 May 2026 11:58:14 GMT

In the final part of our series with food brand consultant Mia Hartwell, we look beyond carbon metrics. While calculating greenhouse gases is vital, the food industry possesses unique social, agricultural, and cultural complexities that require a much broader lens of accountability.

We also look at the real-world success stories: the brands successfully transforming sustainability from a corporate metric into a premium consumer desire.

Escaping "Carbon Myopia" in Food

In many sectors, sustainability reporting has fallen victim to "carbon tunnel vision." But in the food system, carbon is only one piece of an incredibly intricate puzzle.

"As soon as you try to calculate Scope 3 emissions in food manufacturing, you hit a massive, opaque web of global suppliers," Mia notes. "It gets incredibly complicated, very fast."

Because food is deeply social, its sustainability footprint naturally expands into biodiversity, soil health, community resilience, and food waste. Mia highlights a shocking statistic to illustrate the low-hanging fruit available to everyday consumers and brands alike: In the UK, the average person wastes the equivalent of three full meals every single week.

By tackling food waste through industry redistribution initiatives, brands are not just cutting carbon; they are actively addressing social issues like regional hunger and supply chain inequity. Sustainability in food cannot be reduced to a single data point on a spreadsheet, it is inherently holistic.

Three Rockstar Brands Making Sustainability Aspirational

When embedding these deep values into a brand, Mia emphasises that sustainability must never feel like a compromise. It cannot be something a marketing team "sorts out later." It must supercharge the commercial proposition.

Here are three brands Mia highlights as masterclasses in making sustainability highly desirable:

1. Hotel Chocolat: Premiumising the Indulgence

Chocolate is an indulgent, premium purchase. Hotel Chocolat brilliantly utilises its packaging to elevate that experience rather than detract from it. While you enjoy the product, their on-pack messaging clearly communicates their ethical cacao sourcing, ingredient upcycling programmes, and compostable materials. It alleviates consumer guilt and reinforces the premium, crafted perception of the brand, allowing it to command a clear market premium.

2. Bold Bean Co: Making the "Boring" Aspirational

Historically, heirloom beans might have been viewed as a dry, unexciting pantry staple. However, Bold Bean Co took a naturally sustainable, low-carbon, healthy food and turned it into a cult-status culinary object. They focus heavily on provenance, clean sourcing, and soil health, but they ladder it all directly up to one thing: unmatched taste . They made sustainability cool, beautiful, and delicious.

3. Wildfarmed: The Rockstar Farmers

Fixing soil health through regenerative agriculture sounds like a dry, academic subject. Wildfarmed completely flipped the script by creating a literal "rockstar brand" around regenerative flour. With bold, counter-cultural visuals, celebrity backing, and an energetic, disruptive narrative, they made soil restoration feel exciting, relevant, and revolutionary.

Every Job is a Climate Job

Ultimately, Mia’s mission is to empower the individuals sitting inside these corporate structures. Through her consulting work and her role as a leader of She is Sustainable , a volunteer-run Community Interest Company supporting women working across the green sector, she emphasises that real change requires human confidence.

"Every job is a climate job," Mia says. "But if you are working in food, you have the leverage to make more of an impact than almost any other industry on Earth. If you can bake sustainability directly into the heart of your commercial positioning, show how it drives sales, and give your team permission to care, that is where you win."

This concludes our series on the sustainable food revolution. To ensure your marketing strategy is resilient enough to survive the changing climate, keep your eyes on the soil, your messaging transparent, and your brand rooted in trust.

Mia Hartwell - The High Price of Greenhushing and the Health-Planet Link

Thu, 14 May 2026 11:48:26 GMT

In Part 1 , food marketing and sustainability consultant Mia Hartwell outlined the sheer scale of the food industry's environmental footprint. But knowing a problem exists is very different from marketing a solution, especially at a time when consumers are feeling an intense financial squeeze.

Next, we dive into the balancing act facing food marketers: managing short-term cost pressures while building long-term consumer trust.

The Cost-of-Living Dilemma vs. Long-Term Resilience

Right now, food marketers are operating in a pressure cooker. Prices are soaring, supply chains are volatile, and consumers are hyper-focused on their immediate household budgets. In this climate, dedicating resources to sustainability can easily feel like a luxury a brand cannot afford.

Mia argues that this short-term view is incredibly dangerous:

"Without creating sustainable products right now, we simply will not have a business model in the long term," she warns. "If the climate crisis keeps accelerating, the ingredients will not be there to put on the table. Sustainability is not an environmental add-on; it is foundational business resilience ."

The challenge is unlocking the commercial value of that resilience today. According to Mia, the secret lies in building a protective moat of consumer trust, an asset many brands are currently leaving on the table due to fear.

The High Cost of Staying Silent (Greenhushing)

With the regulatory crackdown on greenwashing, many brands have chosen to enter a phase of "greenhushing" , doing good work behind the scenes but staying completely silent in their marketing out of fear of getting things wrong. Mia views this as a massive missed opportunity.

Marketers frequently point to the "say-do gap," noting that while consumers say they care about the environment, they rarely pay a premium for green products at the checkout counter. Mia explains that this is not because consumers do not care; it is because they view sustainability as a baseline requirement:

"Consumers expect you to be getting on with it. They are not paying more for sustainability because they assume you should already be doing it. If you are silent, they will assume you are doing nothing, and that opens up an immediate space for distrust."

If a brand is proactive and transparent about its eco-journey, it builds a reserve of goodwill. If a supply chain crisis hits later down the road, a trusted brand survives; a silent, disconnected brand gets punished by the market.

The Convergence of Health and Planet

For brands wondering how to start communicating these complex ideas without alienating budget-conscious shoppers, Mia points to an accelerating trend: the intersection of human health and planetary health.

Consumers naturally connect "good for me" with "good for the planet."

"Brands that are already talking about health, whether it is boosting fibre, clean protein, or hitting your weekly 'plant points', are in the best position to talk about sustainability," Mia explains.

By framing sustainability through immediate consumer benefits like taste, health, and freshness, environmental initiatives stop feeling preachy and start feeling desirable. This is exactly where concepts like regenerative agriculture are gaining mainstream traction, connecting the consumer directly back to the health of the soil their food was grown in.

In our third and final part , we will look at how to avoid "carbon tunnel vision" in food reporting, and analyse three brilliant food brands that are turning sustainability into a premium, aspirational asset.

Mia Hartwell - Sustainability marketing success in the food sector

Thu, 14 May 2026 11:10:47 GMT

When we talk about sustainable marketing, we often fixate on the digital grid, electric delivery fleets, or supply chain auditing. But there is a massive, tangible monster we interact with multiple times a day, often without a second thought: the food on our plates.

I recently sat down with Mia Hartwell , a brand and sustainability communications consultant specialising in the food sector. Mia has spent her career working with iconic names like Jordans Cereals , a brand legendary for its early commitment to nature-friendly farming, and today, she helps food brands navigate the tricky intersection of commercial marketing and planet-saving initiatives.

Our conversation revealed why the food system is the absolute ultimate leverage point for anyone wanting to make a dent in the climate crisis.

The Flip of the Switch: A Critical Conversation About Plastic

Mia did not start her career with a rigid sustainability mandate. She was a pure marketeer, driven by a deep love for food, brand building, and consumer innovation. But a single, brief conversation behind the scenes fundamentally disrupted her career trajectory.

"I was working in brand innovation, and I had a critical conversation with a colleague one day about packaging," Mia recalls. "Packaging in food is so tangible. We eat breakfast, we unpack lunch, it is everywhere. But I had not given much thought to what it was actually made of."

Her colleague looked at her and said plainly: "You do know that this packaging just gets burnt, right?"

She was referring to the flexible, non-recyclable plastics holding the product. For Mia, that was the ultimate catalyst. "An absolute switch flipped," she says. "I realised that as food manufacturers, we are producing incredible food that can be grown sustainably, but the packaging footprint is devastating our world. I needed to pivot from being a sole marketeer looking after a brand’s metrics to seeing brands as vehicles for real global change."

The Food System: The 30% Invisible Giant

If you want to solve global sustainability issues, you have to look at the food industry. Why? Because the data is staggering:

The Emissions Profile: Food production, encompassing agriculture, processing, manufacturing, and global transport, contributes to roughly 30% of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

The Symbiotic Risk: While food production actively drives climate change, climate change is simultaneously destroying the predictability of agriculture. Floods, droughts, and degraded soil mean that without sustainable restructuring, food brands will not have products to sell in the near future.

The Social & Health Impact: Sustainability is not just carbon; it is people. Currently, about 65% of the UK population is living with overweight or obesity , and chronic diseases are rising. The food system touches land use, water pollution, biodiversity loss, and human health every single day.

Are Marketers the "Evil Masterminds"?

With statistics like these, it is easy to point fingers at marketing teams for driving overconsumption of unhealthy, highly packaged foods. The media often paints food marketers as malicious geniuses plotting to hook the public on addictive products. Mia, however, vehemently rejects this narrative.

"I have never been in a product development room where people are sitting there plotting to cause widespread obesity or environmental collapse," Mia says candidly. "People in this industry are incredibly well-intentioned. Marketers want to delight consumers. But the issue is unintended consequences. "

When optimisation is focused solely on taste, shelf-life, and immediate commercial profitability, the long-term systemic impacts are frequently overlooked.

In Part 2, we will explore how food marketers can balance the current intense cost-of-living crisis with long-term brand resilience, and why staying silent about your green credentials, "greenhushing", is a massive commercial mistake.

Dr Sayed Elhoushy: Beyond Green Claims - Why Sustainability Marketing Must Move From Compliance to Transformation

Wed, 06 May 2026 14:36:53 GMT

Most organisations begin their sustainability journey for one reason - they have to.

Regulation arrives, reporting frameworks tighten, claims scrutiny increases, and legal risk rises. Compliance forces action, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Dr Sayed Elhoushy sees compliance as a legitimate entry point, but only if businesses recognise what comes next, because compliance is a beginning, and not a destination.

The danger of stopping at reporting

Across Europe and the UK, regulatory pressure is intensifying.

The implications of frameworks like green claims regulation, advertising scrutiny, and evidence-based environmental communications are reshaping sustainability marketing.

This is forcing businesses to examine language more carefully, which is long overdue.

Sayed highlights a critical issue: over 50% of environmental claims have historically contained vague, misleading, or unsubstantiated elements.

That’s not just a communications problem; it’s a trust problem, and once trust erodes, rebuilding it becomes exponentially harder.

The four-question green claims filter

For organisations trying to communicate responsibly, Sayed offers a practical framework. Before making any sustainability claim, ask:

1. Are we using loaded buzzwords?

“Sustainable”
“Green”
“Eco-friendly”
“100% natural”

These terms trigger scrutiny immediately.

2. Do we have evidence?

Not assumptions
Not intention
Evidence
Data, methodology, verification, traceability.

3. Has this been independently checked?

For larger organisations, internal validation is no longer enough; third-party verification matters.

4. Have we considered the full sustainability picture?

This is where many brands fail.

The palm oil paradox

Sayed pointed to one of sustainability’s classic examples.

A retailer launches a “No Palm Oil” campaign. At first glance, it appears environmentally responsible, deforestation concerns are real, consumer support follows, but deeper analysis reveals complexity.

Removing palm oil may:

Harm smallholder farmers
Disrupt local economies
Shift demand to potentially less efficient alternatives
Create unintended supply-chain consequences

This is what sustainability professionals call spillover effects, where solving one problem can create another, and marketers must understand these dynamics before communicating solutions.

Sustainability is not single-issue optimisation

This is perhaps the most important mindset shift, as many organisations still approach sustainability through isolated metrics such as carbon, packaging, water and waste.

Each matters, but sustainability is inherently systemic. As Sayed reminds his students, true sustainability requires balancing:

Environmental outcomes
Social outcomes
Economic outcomes

Success in one dimension cannot justify harm in another. This is where simplistic claims collapse.

From compliance to transformation

One of Sayed’s most useful teaching tools is the POST framework:

Problem - define the real challenge
Opportunity - identify where positive change can emerge
Strength - assess capabilities already available
Transformation - c reate actionable pathways forward

The final step is the one most organisations skip - transformation.

Because transformation requires more than reporting, it demands redesign, new thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and strategic courage.

Why marketers matter here

Historically, sustainability has often sat in specialist teams, but transformation cannot happen in silos. It requires marketing, operations, finance, product, and leadership to speak a common language.

This is something Sayed is actively building through sustainability marketing education at Queen Mary, helping students understand that sustainability is not a departmental responsibility. It’s an organisational capability.

The next phase

The brands that thrive in the next decade will not be those best at sustainability storytelling; they’ll be the ones best at sustainability redesign.

Communication still matters, but communication must follow substance.

The question for every marketer is no longer: “How do we talk about sustainability?”

It is: How do we help create business models worth talking about?

Dr Sayed Elhoushy: Stop Telling People to Change - What Sustainability Marketing Gets Wrong About Behaviour

Wed, 06 May 2026 14:36:51 GMT

Marketers love behaviour change, and it’s baked into the profession. Every campaign, every funnel, every piece of messaging ultimately aims to influence what people think, feel, or do.

But sustainability marketing has often misunderstood what meaningful behaviour change actually requires.

Sustainability marketing is more than changing behaviours

Too often, sustainability marketing defaults to instructions such as, use less, buy differently, travel less, and consume responsibly.

The logic is straightforward in that if people change, systems improve.

But as Dr Sayed Elhoushy argues, this framing misses something crucial. People do not make decisions in isolation; they make them within systems designed to shape those decisions.

Unless we change those systems, behaviour-focused sustainability campaigns will keep underperforming.

The “blame the household” trap

Food waste offers one of the clearest examples, where households are often identified as the biggest source of consumer-level food waste.

This has led to endless campaigns focused on better planning, smarter shopping, improved storage, and creativity with leftovers

These might be useful, but nowhere near sufficient.

Sayed’s work with residents in Tower Hamlets revealed that many people already want to waste less. They feel bad when food is discarded.

The issue is rarely indifference; it’s friction.

Promotional structures encourage overbuying
Packaging sizes exceed realistic household needs
Retail environments reward quantity over sufficiency

The waste happens downstream, the design happens upstream, and that distinction changes everything.

Sustainability often feels abstract

One reason many sustainability campaigns fail is that they communicate globally to people who live locally. Messages framed around “saving the planet” often struggle because they lack immediate relevance.

The problem feels too large, distant, complex and uncontrollable.

Sayed emphasises the need for localisation and personalisation as people engage when sustainability becomes tangible:

The waste in their kitchen.
The flood on their street.
The supermarket queue shaped by overtourism.

The challenge for marketers is translating planetary complexity into human immediacy.

Design for easier decisions

The most effective sustainability interventions often remove decision complexity altogether.

Stroodles edible tableware doesn’t ask consumers to evaluate sustainability trade-offs; it eliminates the trade-off.

This reflects an essential shift in mindset:

Instead of asking: “How do we persuade people to make better choices?”
Ask: “How do we redesign the system so better choices happen naturally?”

That’s a radically more effective behavioural strategy.

Beyond campaign thinking

Sustainability marketing has to mature as behaviour change cannot live solely inside communications teams.

It must connect with:

Product design
Operations
Supply chain
Commercial strategy
Customer experience

Otherwise, campaigns become performative overlays on unchanged systems, and consumers notice.

What marketers should do differently

Three questions can transform sustainability communication:

1. What friction are we ignoring?

If people aren’t changing, look beyond motivation, examine structural barriers.

2. Are we asking too much cognitive effort?

Decision fatigue kills sustainable action - simplify.

3. Can we redesign rather than persuade?

The highest-leverage intervention is often systemic - not communicative.

The future belongs to marketers who understand this, not as message creators, but as architects of behavioural ecosystems.

Dr Sayed Elhoushy: Sustainability Marketing Isn’t the Problem; Poor Marketing Is

Wed, 06 May 2026 14:36:50 GMT

For years, sustainability and marketing have been framed as uneasy bedfellows.

One pushes for reduced consumption; the other, supposedly, exists to increase it.

This tension has shaped countless conversations inside boardrooms, classrooms, and agency strategy sessions.

Can marketing ever truly be sustainable?

When I recently spoke with Dr. Sayed Elhoushy, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Queen Mary University of London, he offered a deceptively simple answer:

It depends entirely on how we choose to practise marketing
That distinction matters more than most organisations realise
The overconsumption accusation
The criticism isn’t unfounded

Traditional marketing has often operated as an amplification system for overconsumption, encouraging people to buy more, upgrade faster, replace sooner, and equate ownership with identity.

Seen through this lens, marketing has undeniably contributed to environmental pressure. Sayed ’s own sustainability journey began with witnessing this firsthand.

During field training in a large hotel early in his career, he encountered industrial-scale food waste leaving restaurant kitchens every day; the scale shocked him.

That moment became the beginning of his research into sustainable consumer behaviour and food waste reduction, work that now informs his teaching and published research.

But his conclusion wasn’t that marketing should be abandoned; it was that it should be reimagined.

Marketing as a behaviour-shaping discipline

If your definition of marketing is “advertising designed to sell more products,” sustainability and marketing will always clash.

If your definition is broader, i.e. creating, communicating, and delivering value, then marketing becomes one of the most powerful tools available for sustainability transformation. That’s because marketers understand:

Behavioural triggers
Narrative framing
Habit formation
Social norms
Cultural meaning-making

These are exactly the tools sustainability requires.

The challenge isn’t whether marketing belongs in sustainability; the challenge is whether marketers are willing to evolve their role.

The food waste lesson

One of Sayed’s most revealing examples comes from food waste research conducted with communities in Tower Hamlets.

On paper, households are responsible for around 60% of food waste at the consumer level.

That statistic seems to point to an obvious solution of changing consumer behaviour. But when speaking directly with households, another story emerged.

People weren’t carelessly wasting food, but they were consistently buying more than they intended, even when entering supermarkets with shopping lists.

The real culprit was a retail environment engineered to influence purchasing decisions through promotions, layout design, visual cues, scarcity framing, and behavioural nudges.

This reframes the problem entirely.

It’s not simply about educating individuals; it’s about recognising the systems that shape them. That’s where marketing becomes central.

Stop responsibilising the consumer

One of the most damaging tendencies in sustainability communication is what might be called responsibility dumping.

You’ve seen it:

Fly less
Waste less
Buy better
Recycle more
Choose wisely

None of these messages is inherently wrong, but the problem is when they imply that sustainability failure rests primarily with individual consumers.

As Sayed notes, people are increasingly fatigued by being told they alone must solve systemic problems.

Eventually, communication fatigue becomes disengagement, then scepticism and then outright resistance.

This is one reason sustainability messaging so often fails, not because audiences don’t care, but because they feel unfairly burdened.

A better model: redesign the system

One of the most compelling examples we discussed was Stroodles. Rather than persuading consumers to make “better” decisions around single-use plastic cutlery, the company redesigned the product entirely by creating edible utensils.

No behaviour-change lecture required, no guilt-based messaging, no decision fatigue, just a fundamentally better system design.

This is sustainability marketing at its best, not persuasion, but transformation.

The marketer’s new brief

The future of sustainability marketing is not about making unsustainable systems sound responsible. It’s about helping organisations redesign value creation itself.

That means asking harder questions:

Are we solving the problem upstream?
Are we changing products, not just campaigns?
Are we reducing decision friction?
Are we creating behavioural ease?
Are we designing for better defaults?

This is a fundamentally more ambitious role for marketing and a far more meaningful one.

The marketers who embrace it won’t simply communicate sustainability, they’ll help create it.

Deepa Rao: Greenwashing - AI is reading your footnotes

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:57:24 GMT

I n the final part of our conversation with Deepa Rao , we look at the end-game of digital sustainability: accountability. If you think your 100-page sustainability report is gathering dust on a shelf, think again. The AI is reading it, and it's looking for contradictions.

Greenwashing: Ambition vs. Capability

Deepa argues that most greenwashing isn't a deliberate "lie"; it’s a gap between a CEO's ambition and a company's capability.

"A communication team or a CEO genuinely wants to do the right thing and makes a bold commitment to be Net Zero by 2040," Deepa says. "But then the operational and finance teams have to actually deliver it. The story being told externally gets way ahead of the reality internally."

This leads to three common types of "Unintentional Greenwashing":

Selective Disclosure: Highlighting the solar panels on the roof while staying silent about the massive Scope 3 emissions in the supply chain.
Metric Washing: Reporting numbers confidently without having the governance to back up how those numbers were calculated.
Goalpost Moving: Realising the data wasn't backed up and quietly shifting the target dates.

The AI Auditor

The biggest warning Deepa has for marketers today is that humans are no longer your primary audience.

"Investors are using AI to read your reports. Even the footnotes," Deepa reveals. "You might think a small footnote goes unnoticed, but AI catches contradictory statements instantly. It can analyse your report against your peers in minutes. If your business model shouldn't be able to achieve a certain result but you're claiming you have, the AI will find the outlier."

Deepa’s advice? Run your own report through AI before you publish it. Ask it to find contradictions or "brutal" questions a journalist might ask. Use the technology to be your own toughest auditor.

Governance as Value Creation

Ultimately, Deepa’s work isn't about ticking boxes; it's about Value Creation .

"If you have proper governance, the C-Suite is happy because the data is defensible. Finance is happy because they can see the ROI. And the sustainability team is happy because they’re having a real impact," she says.

When sustainability is embedded into the "Tone at the Top", linked to incentives and executive compensation, it stops being a "good to have" and becomes a strategic advantage.

"Sustainability isn't a cost," Deepa concludes. "It’s a risk if you don't do it, and a value creator if you do. Your company doesn't have a shelf life if you keep adapting and creating value through the right initiatives."

Deepa’s insights remind us that in the age of AI, transparency isn't just a virtue; it’s a survival mechanism. Governance is the foundation that ensures the "green" in your marketing is backed by the "gold" of audited truth.

Deepa Rao: The Deep Irony of the AI Solution

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:57:22 GMT

In Part 1 , Deepa Rao explained why sustainability reporting is moving toward the same rigour as financial auditing. But as companies turn to Artificial Intelligence to solve their "data drowning" problem, a new set of risks is emerging.

Deepa calls it a "Deep Irony." We are using carbon-intensive technology to solve carbon problems.

The AI Double-Edged Sword

AI is a remarkable tool for sustainability. Deepa points to real-world use cases that are already moving the needle:

Grid Optimisation: Using AI to predict energy needs and reduce waste.
Agricultural Resilience: Predicting crop failures and optimising supply chains to reduce food waste.
Climate Modelling: Helping CEOs map a realistic trajectory toward Net Zero rather than just picking a date out of a hat.

However, the cost of this intelligence is physical. "Training a Large Language Model (LLM) consumes enormous amounts of energy and water," Deepa notes. "Data centres are contributing significantly to the carbon footprint. You’re using an intensive technology to solve an intensive problem."

The "Black Box" Problem

The marriage of AI and Governance is equally complicated. Governance requires transparency and accountability , but AI is often a "Black Box."

"AI systems can hallucinate. They can be opaque," Deepa warns. "If a regulator asks you to explain an output, you have to be able to show how the AI reached that conclusion and how a human reviewed it. If you can't explain it, you can't govern it."

Beware of "AI-Washing"

Just as we saw the rise of greenwashing, we are now seeing AI-Washing . This is the tendency for companies to take a traditional system they’ve had for years, "bung some AI on it," and claim it's a revolutionary new sustainability solution.

Deepa suggests that AI’s most powerful role isn't just in the reporting, it’s in the Organisational Strategy . "AI can predict what will happen to your offices in coastal areas over the next ten years. It helps you build a better Business Continuity Plan (BCP). It’s about making sure the organisation doesn't get blindsided by climate issues."

In our final part , we’ll look at how the "Audit Mindset" can eliminate greenwashing and why the AI might be reading your sustainability report more closely than any human ever will.

Deepa Rao: Sustainability, AI & Governance - a converging future

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:57:20 GMT

In the world of corporate sustainability, there are "dreamers" and there are "doers." But as the landscape shifts from voluntary reporting to strict regulatory compliance, a third group has emerged: the Assurers .

I recently sat down with Deepa Rao , a Chartered Accountant and internal auditor who found herself at the forefront of the sustainability revolution before it even had a formal name. Today, we explore how her background in risk and audit is shaping the future of "must-have" sustainability.

From SOX to Sustainability

Deepa’s journey into the green sector wasn't born in a biology lab, but in the world of finance and internal audit. Her brain is wired for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) , the rigorous set of standards that ensure financial data is accurate and free of fraud.

"A few years back, when my company started its sustainability report, I was the one saying, 'We need SOX-like controls for this reporting,'" Deepa recalls. "That’s when I was called to the other side of the table to build what that program looked like."

Deepa became one of the industry's first ESG Controllers , a role that bridges the gap between environmental passion and financial precision.

The Shift: From "Good to Have" to "Must Have"

The "Sustainability Bubble" of the early 2020s was often characterised by glossy brochures and vague promises. But in 2026, the conversation has fundamentally changed.

"If you want to be in the race with your peers or stay competitive, you cannot ignore sustainability," Deepa explains. "The regulators have arrived. Every jurisdiction now has a list of 'ten things' you must comply with, especially regarding climate action, if you want to do business there."

The Converging Triple Threat: Sustainability, AI, and Governance

Deepa’s current role is a rare blend of three massive pillars. While many organisations keep these in separate silos, Deepa sees them as a single, converging force:

Sustainability: The What -the long-term viability of the business and the planet.
AI : The How - the tool used to automate data, predict risks, and scale initiatives.
Governance : The Should We? - the framework that ensures the data is accurate, auditable, and ethical.

"Sustainability teams today are drowning in data," Deepa says. "AI can make sense of that complexity, but without governance, you end up with a 'black box' output that no one can explain or trust. Governance is what allows AI to be used for credible sustainability work."

I n Part 2, we’ll dive into the "Deep Irony" of AI; how a tool designed to save the planet might actually be putting a strain on it, and how to spot the rise of AI-washing.

Ashley John: The human side of digital accessibility

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:20:14 GMT

In the final part of our conversation, Ashley John moves beyond the "carbon tunnel vision" that traps many sustainability professionals. While measuring emissions is vital, Ashley argues that true digital sustainability must account for the social impact: the people behind the screens, the accessibility of information, and the ethics of the tools we use.

Beyond "carbon myopia"

For many, "sustainability" is synonymous with "carbon footprint." But as Ashley points out, focusing solely on emissions is a form of tunnel vision.

"We’re dealing with people," Ashley says. "It’s about the social aspects of sustainability; engaging with communities in a way where they can actually read and understand what’s on your website."

To make this "doing the right thing" accessible to everyone, Ashley has committed to a "freemium" model for his suite of tools. "A lot of companies are priced out of doing the right thing. With EcoPigs , you can monitor one website for free, forever."

A toolkit for radical transparency

Ashley hasn't just stopped at website emissions. He has developed an entire ecosystem of tools designed to strip away the "fluff" and get to the truth:

Noissme.com: A carbon accounting tool (emission spelt backwards) that simplifies Scope 1, 2, and 3 reporting. "I found other tools inundated users with irrelevant questions about refrigerant gases or bioenergy. If you're a creative agency in a shared office, you don't need that. Noisssme strips away the noise."
Swynx: A tool for developers that looks at "code health." It identifies "dead code" and "bloat" that waste energy, while remaining completely air-gapped for security.
Scope 3 Clarity: Ashley is pushing for a focus on Scope 3, the indirect emissions that make up 90% of a company’s impact, rather than just the "tip of the iceberg" Scope 1 and 2 metrics that companies use to look green.

Oynk SE: the social enterprise

Perhaps the most exciting development is the launch of Oynk SE (Social Enterprise) . In Part 2, we discussed the JEDI (Justice, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) requirements for B Corp. One of those requirements is that websites must be tested by people with real living disabilities.

In partnership with Tom Cliff of Cafe Track, Ashley is creating a network of neurodivergent and disabled testers to provide manual audits of websites.

"We’re going to give these people real money. It’s life-changing for people who have been ignored or sidelined. They get to provide qualified feedback: 'I struggled to press tab here' or 'it took too long to contact you.' It creates a circular economy of meaningful work and accessible design."

Dirty by design: challenging the status quo

Ashley is now taking his findings to the page in his upcoming book, Dirty by Design , currently being released chapter-by-chapter on Substack.

The book is an antagonist's look at the "assumptions" that have governed digital sustainability for the last decade. Ashley is openly challenging the established giants like the Green Web Foundation, arguing that their methods are based on outdated data and "best guesses."

"I’m not being malicious," Ashley clarifies. "I’m saying: let’s raise the bar. If you’ve had ten years to fix your model and I’ve hammered what you’ve done in 18 months, did you really care? Or was it just more subconscious greenwashing?"

The bottom line

Ashley’s mission is clear: move away from "tick-box" sustainability and toward a defensible, science-based, and human-centric framework. By making tools free, empowering the disabled community, and demanding accuracy over assumptions, he is rewriting the rules of the digital road.

As Ashley puts it: "Everything is there. It’s transparent. If you want to argue with me about the metrics, come to the website and let’s talk. My method is correct because it’s based on fact, not fiction."

This concludes our three-part series on digital sustainability. For more insights into marketing with integrity, subscribe to Sustainability Marketing Survival Conversations.

Ashley John: The Integrity Proxy

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:20:12 GMT

In Part 1 , Ashley John , founder of Oynk and EcoPigs , pulled back the curtain on the flaws of standard digital carbon calculators. But as our conversation continued, it became clear that digital sustainability isn't just about carbon, it’s about a broader sense of corporate honesty.

If your website is the "front door" to your business, what happens when the welcome mat is a lie?

Can we trust you?

Ashley has coined a powerful term for the modern marketer: the Integrity Proxy . It’s a simple litmus test for brand authenticity.

"If someone wants to know about you, they go to your website first because it’s non-committal," Ashley explains. "If you claim to care about the planet and people, but your website has terrible emissions and fails basic accessibility standards, how can you be trusted?"

For Ashley, a website that ignores these factors isn't just a technical failure; it’s a breach of brand promise. To combat this, Oynk builds with "100% clarity." Every site includes a transparent report and a live "pig badge" that users can click to see the actual methodology and real-time data.

"How can we trust anything else you tell us if your own website isn't even accurate?"

Beyond carbon: the rise of JEDI

The conversation in sustainability is rapidly shifting toward Scope 3 reporting and social impact. Ashley notes that B Corp’s V2 model now includes a critical section called JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion).

This isn't just a "nice to have" anymore; it’s a requirement. For new B Corps, accessibility is now baked into the certification process. This shift aligns perfectly with Ashley’s new framework for digital excellence: PEER.

The Four Pillars of PEER:

Performance: Speed isn't just for UX; every second of load time can cost you 7% of your traffic.

Emissions: Real-time tracking of the digital footprint.

Experience: Ensuring the site works for everyone, regardless of ability.

Ranking: High-performing, low-emission sites naturally rank better on Google.

"When I talked to people about 'sustainability,' they didn't always care," Ashley admits. "But when I talk about a website that ranks higher, loads in under a second, and eliminates bounce rates? Now they're listening."

The high bar of accessibility

One of the most challenging aspects of the JEDI metrics is the Flesch-Kincaid reading level . To reach the gold standard (AAA), website content should be readable by someone at grade 10 or under.

This requires a radical simplification of language that many brands find painful. Ashley shares a recent example: "We had to change 'make a positive change' to 'make a real change.' Why? Because 'positive' has too many syllables. We even struggled with the word 'business' vs 'firm.' It’s a constant back-and-forth to ensure no one is excluded."

This level of detail extends to colour ratios. To meet AAA standards, you need a 7:1 contrast ratio . "I'm eating my own dog food here," Ashley laughs. "I had to rework my own Oynk branding because my yellow and white combo didn't meet the ratio. I can't tell clients to do it if I won't do it myself."

A meaningful digital future

For Ashley, this mission is personal. As someone with autism and ADHD, he understands how exclusionary a poorly designed digital space can be.

"There are people who don't have the capacity to navigate a 'boring' or overly complex site. Are we excluding them from the workplace? From reading the company intranet? From understanding an email?"

By combining EcoPigs' live emissions tracking with the JEDI accessibility framework, Ashley is building more than just websites; he's building a structure for digital integrity. In an era of "subconscious greenwashing," the only way forward is through radical, data-backed transparency.

Digital sustainability is no longer just about the environment; it’s about ensuring the digital world is open, honest, and accessible to everyone.

Ashley John: Combating subconscious greenwashing in digital sustainability

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:49:37 GMT

In the world of sustainable marketing, we often focus on physical supply chains, plastic-free packaging, and carbon-neutral shipping. But an invisible culprit is lurking in our browsers: the digital carbon footprint.

I recently sat down with Ashley John , founder of the digital sustainability and accessibility consultancy Oynk, and the mastermind behind EcoPigs , to discuss why current digital sustainability metrics are failing us and how "subconscious greenwashing" is skewing our understanding of a "green" website.

From Creative Agency to Carbon Calculators

Ashley’s journey didn’t start with a mission to save the planet; it started with a mission to build better websites. In August 2024, Oynk launched as an agency focused on optimised design.

"Low carbon was actually a byproduct of optimisation," Ashley explains. "No one wants a clunky website. Naturally, everything we built was optimised for performance, speed, and emissions."

As he delved deeper into the sector, he noticed a gap. Popular tools like Website Carbon or EcoGrader provided a snapshot of a homepage’s emissions, but they lacked depth. They didn't account for the user's entire journey or the "dirtiness" of the energy grid at any given moment.

"I wanted something I could give to my clients so they could see their real impact," Ashley says. This spark led to the birth of EcoPigs .

The Problem with "The Homepage Grade"

Most businesses brag about an "A" rating from a carbon calculator, but Ashley warns that these grades can be dangerously misleading.

The Single-Page Trap: Most tools only measure the homepage. "If you click through to other pages, those have emissions too," Ashley notes. EcoPigs V2 evolved into a dashboard that monitors the entire site (including cookies and policies), using live visitor tracking.

The "Dirty" Evolution: A website isn't static. A developer might hand over a "Green A" site, but then the client adds a high-res video or unoptimized blog images. Suddenly, that "A" is a "C," and without constant monitoring, the owner is unknowingly claiming a sustainability status they no longer hold.

"Agreement isn't accuracy; it's just a bunch of people saying 'that will do'."

Identifying "Subconscious Greenwashing"

Perhaps the most provocative part of our conversation centred on what Ashley calls subconscious greenwashing . This happens when companies believe they are being sustainable based on flawed data models.

1. The Grid Discrepancy

Most industry-standard tools use a global average for energy grid intensity (around 494g CO2e/kWh). Ashley argues that tools can reduce the data centre portion of emissions based on a green hosting factor.

"In EcoPigs, we use live data from 28 different countries' grids that updates every 15 minutes," he says. This reveals the truth about the hosting location. For example:

Sweden: Relies heavily on hydro energy (very clean).
Poland: Relies heavily on coal (very dirty).

If both companies claim "green hosting," standard tools treat them as equals. However, if the Polish company is simply buying Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to "offset" their coal-powered data centre, Ashley argues the planet doesn't care. "The grid doesn't understand a certificate. The energy powering your website is still dirty.

2. The Weight of Objects

Another flaw in current logic is treating all data as equal. Current tools see a 2MB image and 2MB of JavaScript as having the same carbon footprint.

"It doesn't work that way," Ashley explains. "An image is a static download; it requires almost no compute. JavaScript requires action and processing, which uses more energy over a longer period." EcoPigs differentiates between these, measuring actual compute and energy usage rather than just file size.

Why Real-Time Monitoring Matters

The ultimate goal of EcoPigs isn't just to give a grade, but to provide a live look "under the bonnet." By using a lightweight tracking method to map real-time visitor journeys and fluctuating grid data, businesses can see their emissions rise and fall throughout the day.

As Ashley puts it, we have evolved beyond the stage of "estimated guesses." To truly combat digital greenwashing, we have to stop settling for "good enough" metrics and start looking at the hard, real-time science of how the internet actually breathes.